Project Spinnaker was a joint Canada-US defence project started in the late 1980s - the waning days of the Cold War. Its goal was to provide Canada with the capability to monitor Soviet submarine activity in its Arctic waters with acoustic arrays deployed on the seafloor at strategic choke points.

The star of Project Spinnaker was Theseus, a Canadian-made autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), designed to lay fibre-optic cable on the seafloor from shore out to the edge of the Continental Shelf, almost 200 kilometres away.

Into the Labyrinth is the story of how Theseus came to be, and how it completed its record-shattering cable-laying mission in the spring of 1996. It is the story of the engineers and technologists from a small Canadian sub-sea company that built, tested, and deployed what was at the time the largest AUV ever built.

Written by the Theseus Systems Engineer, Into the Labyrinth provides a fascinating look into the high-tech engineering world of the 1980s and 1990s set against the backdrop of Canada's High Arctic.